Vanilla sky

In the movie Vanilla Sky, the main character David goes into a state of lucid dreaming after his death, the audience as well as himself does not find out about this till the end of the film. Through out the film David lives in a state of distorted reality, in which is a jumbled mess of his dreams and the cruel reality of the real world. David's love interest before his accident, Sophia, remains to be the focus of his dreams and fantasies; she is beautiful, goddess like, and David treasures her as true love. However, this love only exists in his dreams, and when he is aware that they are just merely dreams, the shots reflect his self-awareness. Both shots are of Sophia looking straight into the camera as though look into David's eyes; as the audience is watching through David's perspective. Both shots are medium shots with warm colors in the background with highlighting, the first shot focuses on Sophia smiling at David as the camera slowly tracks from a medium close up to a long shot. Suggesting David's physiological self realization and the distance between himself and reality. The second shot is vice versa  slowly tracking from an long shot to a medium close up of Sophia, revealing David's self-acceptance of  the situation and making his last moments before waking filled with love and joy as he leans in to a kiss with Sophia. The emphasize on the sky plays a major role throughout the film, also hence the title, Vanilla Sky. In almost every scene of David's dreams where the sky can be seen, they are low angle shots with the sky being in the top portion of the screen, sometimes tilting up to reveal more sky to his emotional and physiological changes, belittled and surrounded by paranoia of losing all things with value in his life; within those shots, the sky is always a vanilla-caramel color, something that would not be natural in the real world, especially in New York. However, towards the end of the film when David's tech support takes him to the roof with the truth of his lucid dreams, the sky is shot from an eye level being most of the background of the shot for the first time through out the entire movie. This suggests David finally being in control of his choices,  standing above the city with everything beautiful and clear, and the freedom he holds to be free from the nightmare and step into the real world, 150 years later.

The ending scene of the film has a rather positive vibe compared to the rest of the movie, warm colors and highlighting along with soft, light music leading up to David's final awakening. As David pulls from the kiss and runs to the edge of the roof, the scene speeds up and moves to an aerial shot of New York. The camera cuts swiftly but quickly from Sophia to David through each other's perspectives; the shots captures Sophia at a high angle as sort of a goodbye, and David at a low angle looking back at Sophia with high key back lighting behind him, bright light seeping through the clouds of the vanilla sky, creating David in a Christ like figure, in control and powerful. The cut shows the switch of power in the relationship and David's life, Sophia is belittled and no longer the primary focus in his life and he is about to leap into the rest of his life in complete control of himself, literally. The leap is in slow motion as he is falling to the ground, the scene is cut to different flashbacks of his life, dreams or not,  as he is falling. The different flashbacks speeds up and become more jumbled and chaotic, his life all flashing before his eye as he is falling to his end, or rather beginning;a bright white light that silence the screen as the light at the end of the tunnel. Flashbacks  are also sneaked throughout the film as David is being questioned about what happened and what did not; quick, distorted cuts of David rolling on the floor in misery right before his death, images of the Ellie, and tech support offering him the contract. These quick flashes are often accompanied by muffled noises in that to confuse the audience as well as David to the distortion of reality.